HOMEWARD BOUND

IN ROBERT FAGLES'S `ODYSSEY,' WANDERING IS THE HERO'S PLIGHT, NOT HIS QUEST

Author: By John Ferguson, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, April 20, 1997

Page: N15

Section: Books

In part that's precisely because of Fagles's attentiveness to the Homer even lay readers have heard of: the great storyteller whose hypnotic ``epithets'' and heroic similes have been honored and imitated for two millennia. Fagles does justice to the narrative velocity of the poem, to its economy, and he writes a supple English that's especially pleasing when read aloud. Even more happily, he is almost always able to balance familiar diction and syntax with a sense that this work was not created the other day, or one suburb over. Listen, for example, to the outburst of Odysseus's old comrade, Menelaus, when he hears of the outrages perpetrated by the suitors who besiege Penelope in her husband's absence:

``How shameful!''

The red-haired king burst out in anger. ``That's the bed

of a brave man of war they'd like to crawl inside,

those spineless, craven cowards!

Weak as the doe that beds down her fawns

in a mighty lion's den -- her newborn sucklings --

then trails off to the mountain spurs and grassy bends

to graze her fill, but back the lion comes to his own lair

and the master deals both fawns a ghastly bloody death,

just what Odysseus will deal that mob -- ghastly death.''

This balance of familiar and foreign is central to our understanding of Homer, who is at once the first of ``us'' -- the first known practitioner of literature in the Western tradition -- and an imposingly remote figure, one whose two great poems were already old when the ancients read them. (By the time Aeschylus began writing plays, ``The Odyssey'' had been around at least as long as ``Moby-Dick'' has, from our perspective; Homer was to Virgil what Chaucer is to us.) His personal history and his method of composition have been subjects of almost continual debate. The various facets of the Homeric question, along with other historical, linguistic, and literary material, are treated in Bernard Knox's introduction to Fagles's ``Odyssey,'' an essay that is a model of clarity and concision. To reduce an immensely complex matter to simple form: Scholars now believe that Homer was indeed an individual, a supremely skilled singer of verse stories in a well-established tradition of creating such works in performance, and that his masterpieces were recorded at about the time Greeks were learning to write using their new alphabet. No one will ever know for sure whether Homer himself set pen to papyrus. We must imagine him as a brilliant improviser, someone who's heard everything worth hearing in his field and has both the taste and the technique to do better, who comes along at the historical moment when for the first time his genius can be documented, preserved, and distributed -- and who is recognized forever after as the master. We must imagine, in other words, a storytelling equivalent of Louis Armstrong.

And the story he told in ``The Odyssey''? Stop me if you've heard this, but: After 10 years of warfare, a Greek force finally takes and sacks the city of Troy, thanks to a strategem devised by Odysseus, the craftiest of them all. The victors take to their ships and set off for their homes. Odysseus, blown off course and pursued by a vengeful Poseidon, survives a series of adventures over 10 years of wandering. In the meantime, scores of suitors -- usurpers, really -- move into his palace, badgering his wife, Penelope, to choose a new husband from among them; Odysseus's father and his son are both dispossessed. Finally, with the help of Athena, the hero returns home to evict the usurpers and restore his kingdom and his family to peace and order.

It's a terrific tale, full of derring-do and great locations and superheroics and a woman in jeopardy -- all of which will presumably be delivered in the made-for-TV version due from NBC next month. (We can even hope that the TV-movie folks will recognize the bed Odysseus built for his bride, the ``secret sign'' of his life with Penelope, for what it is -- one of the most apt and deftly handled emblems in all of literature.) But this is not the way Homer tells it. He begins with Odysseus's son, Telemachus, who puts aside his feelings of inadequacy and goes in search of news about his long-lost father. Telemachus hears some wonderful stories, but nothing immediately helpful. Only then do we join the hero, about to be released from the island of the nymph Calypso. After 20 days on a raft, he reaches the land of the helpful Phaeacians, where he listens to a minstrel until the story of the sack of Troy moves him to tears and he must tell his own story.

It is now that we hear the adventures so often remembered when we think of Odysseus -- the Lotus-eaters and the Cyclops, the Laestrygonian cannibals and the enchantments of Circe, the journey to the land of the dead and the singing of the Sirens. (Some of these stories-within-the-story fill just a few lines, but each now represents an immense tradition on its own.) When Odysseus is finished telling those tales, 12 of the poem's 24 books are done. In the next one, he is landed on Ithaca by the Phaeacians, and the rest of the work traces his strategy in ridding his house of the usurpers.

To read the ``Odyssey,'' then, is for long stretches to read a story about storytelling, about its uses and enchantments. And in the rereading, especially, the poem comes to seem far more modern, more consciously constructed, than memory recalls. There is also a sense of playfulness, of exuberant invention, to many passages, and Fagles is adept at conveying it. When Odysseus at last reaches Ithaca, for example, he is deeply asleep; he wakes to a landscape Athena has shrouded in supernatural mist, just as she has disguised both him and herself. His conversation with this stranger contains layers of concealment and fabrication we usually meet only in modernist novels, opera buffa, or sitcoms -- for Odysseus, without missing a beat, launches into lies about who he is and where he's come from. When at last Athena reveals herself, she tells him:

``Any man -- any god who met you -- would have to be

some champion lying cheat to get past you

for all-round craft and guile! You terrible man,

foxy, ingenious, never tired of twists and

tricks --

so, not even here, on native soil, would you give up

those wily tales that warm the cockles of your heart!''

It is impossible not to imagine Homer smiling as he sang the lines that inspired that translation.

But we are always reimagining Homer and his tales. Poets from Dante (who created his Ulysses without reading the original) through Tennyson and Constantine Cavafy have powerfully reimagined the hero himself, making him a model of adventurousness, even cosmic wanderlust. We think we remember that Odysseus was more in love with his travels than with his homecoming, and this collective memory now regards him as the first Westerner: a progenitor of the urge to exploration, the refusal to stay quietly at home that has led Europe to its greatest feats and its greatest outrages.

It is striking, then, that in reading the poem itself we meet a somewhat different character. Odysseus is certainly resourceful, and valiant enough to journey to Hades and back. At one point he sets out to sail home from Calypso's island on a raft, when he knows from bitter experience how fragile a fully manned warship is. But ``sail home'' is exactly the point: This quest is for the hero's own marriage bed, and the great journey of the ``Odyssey'' is toward Ithaca after all.

It is a journey on which Robert Fagles is excellent company.

the commands of Zeus still ringing in her ears --

and found him there on the headland, sitting, still,

weeping, his eyes never dry, his sweet life flowing away

with the tears he wept for his foiled journey home,

since the nymph no longer pleased. In the nights, true,

he'd sleep with her in the arching cave -- he had no choice --

unwilling lover alongside lover all too willing . . .

But all his days he'd sit on the rocks and beaches,

wrenching out his heart with sobs and groans and anguish,

gazing out over the barren sea through blinding tears.

THE ODYSSEY (Book V, 165-175)

Translated by Robert Fagles